Entanglement witnesses are a key instrument in determining the entanglement of unknown bipartite qubit systems without requiring a full tomography. Riccardi et al. (2020) proposed a set of two-qubit witnesses, denoted
{W3}, which require a set of local measurements in three bases. In this work we propose an additional set of witnesses, denoted
{W5}, that build on
{W3} and require measurements in two additional bases. We present an adaptive two-step method that uses the measurement results obtained for
{W3} to select which
W5 to evaluate. We computationally demonstrate that our adaptive two-step protocol can identify 72% of entangled states generated according to the methods of Roik et al. (2021) while requiring measurements in only five of the nine bases needed for full quantum tomography. Additionally, we experimentally verify the behavior of both sets of witnesses using polarization-entangled photon pairs.
Imperfections in experimental measurement schemes can lead to falsely identifying, or over estimating, entanglement in a quantum system. A recent solution to this is to define schemes that are robust to measurement imperfections-measurement-device-independent entanglement witness (MDI-EW). This approach can be adapted to witness all entangled qubit states for a wide range of physical systems and does not depend on detection efficiencies or classical communication between devices. Here we extend the theory to remove the necessity of prior knowledge about the two-qubit states to be witnessed. Moreover, we tested this model via a novel experimental implementation for MDI-EW that significantly reduces the experimental complexity. By applying it to a bipartite Werner state, we demonstrate the robustness of this approach against noise by witnessing entanglement down to an entangled state fraction close to 0.4.
We experimentally demonstrate a method for detection of entanglement via construction of entanglement witnesses from a limited fixed set of local measurements ( M ). Such a method does not require a priori knowledge about the form of the entanglement witnesses. It is suitable for a scenario where a full state tomography is not available, but the only resource is a limited set of M . We demonstrate the method on pure two-qubit entangled states and mixed two-qubit entangled states, which emerge from photonic implementation of controllable quantum noisy channels. The states we select are motivated by realistic experimental conditions, and we confirm it works well for both cases. Furthermore, possible generalizations to higher-dimensional bipartite systems have been considered, which can potentially detect both decomposable and indecomposable entanglement witnesses. Our experimental results show perfect validity of the method, which indicates that even a limited set of local measurements can be used for quick entanglement detection and further provide a practical test bed for experiments with entanglement witnesses.